Good morning/afternoon, my chickadees. I hope your days are going well. Depending on what time you’re reading this (and I guess whether or not you’re “sick” the Wednesday before Thanksgiving), we have 11 or 12 days left of classes before finals. I hope this is as exciting to you as it is to me: I know I, for one, love the impending caffeine-fueled all-nighters that leave everyone on campus looking like zombies. Three cheers for finals: Hip-hip, hooray! Hip-hip, ho-… OK, maybe not.

You’ll have to forgive me, I’m a bit hyper tonight and slightly frustrated: I’d like nothing better than to be drinking a half-priced beer at Barley’s right now, but some of my girlfriends (a term I’m using as my grandmother uses it, not as Ellen Degeneres uses it) are out at a movie, and several other friends have insisted for some reason that they can’t drink and study at the same time. So I am sitting here at home instead, writing my column, because my friends have other plans and responsibilities, and I’m not in the mood to drink alone at a bar (though usually I have no qualms about this).

Coordinating schedules is a pain. When my friends can go to wine night, I have a test to study for, and when I have a weekend free to drive up to D.C., my friend, S, has a 30-page paper to write and can’t meet me (this example is based on a true story). I anticipate that finding occasions to see friends will only become more difficult. Our impending graduation means my friends and I will (hopefully) have jobs with little free time and probably spread farther apart geographically. We will have to be much more intentional in our relationships with one another.

This is something I’m not very good with. Here in Knoxville, I’m extraordinarily lucky in that I live with my three best friends; it’s not that much of an effort to hang out with them. (In fact, I see them a little too much … just kidding.) How much of an effort do I make with my other friends, though, the ones I don’t live with? Or the ones who are in other states?

I will answer my own question in case none of you stalk me regularly: I don’t make as much of an effort as I could. I’m afraid I am one of those people who becomes so wrapped up in her own life that she has neither the time nor the energy to involve herself, more than superficially, in others’ lives. I have friends here in town that I love dearly but I almost never see because I’m “busy” all the time; as if this “busyness” is some sort of all-powerful force that controls my thoughts and actions.

All of us lead hectic, busy lives. Whether this is healthy or not, we can discuss another day: The reality is that, right now, I constantly run around like a chicken with my head cut off (but a free-range, organic chicken). This is my choice. I chose to enroll in my busy classes, chose to work part-time, chose to be involved in various extracurriculars. When I am too busy to involve myself in my friends’ lives, isn’t that also a choice I am making? Am I, to put it bluntly, prioritizing, though perhaps subconsciously, something over my friends?

In some cases, such a prioritization may be appropriate. We all have duties and responsibilities to our professors and bosses, and we ought to fulfill those (something I fail at constantly). I’m concerned, though, because what I seem to be prioritizing over my friends is not my work, but myself: my free time, alone time, chill time, playing-on-iTunes time, whatever.

It is important to have time to rest, yes. But relationships are costly, in terms of both time and emotion. If I’m not willing to give up some of my time and energy to be intentional in my relationships with my friends, what does that say about how I value my friends in comparison with how I value myself?

Not, I’m afraid, anything positive.

If you’ll let me be honest: It occasionally hurts when friends of mine haven’t read my columns; it hurts not to have been thought of. For me (I probably read this somewhere), the opposite of love isn’t hate, but apathy, the absence of any sort of care at all. If I’m not intentional in my relationships with my friends — if I’m not thinking about them in the midst of the whirlwind of my own preoccupations — what does that say to them about how I value them?

Enjoy your homecoming weekend! I have some very dear friends coming in town, and we are going to party like it’s 1999 (which I guess means we’ll be acting like 11 year olds?). Until next time.

—Leigh Dickey is a senior in global studies and Latin. She can be reached at [email protected].